Unitarian Pride

Brian Frank, member of our congregation spoke this morning on Unitarian Pride. His message was warmly received by our congregation so I wanted to pass it on to a larger audience. Pride month begins Monday and this is a great message of appreciation to send out. Brian was happy to give me permission to share it with you.

Good morning, my name is Brian Frank and I’ve been a member of FUUSA since September 2007, along with my partner Steven … and of course you all know our son Darius. I want to speak to you today about what it’s meant for our family to be welcomed into FUUSA, and what FUUSA’s support of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community – what we call the GLBT community – means to us both as individuals and as families.

Steven and I chose to come to FUUSA for many reasons, but a large part of our choice was due to our overall goal to raise our son Darius in an environment that is as accepting of his family as possible. We chose to place Darius in a Montessori school as part of that decision, and have become active in the GLBT parenting community so that Darius will grow up surrounded by other children from families like his. Yet paradoxically, our success in creating this kind of environment for Darius has left us with another problem that soon we will have to face.

You see, Darius knows that our family is different, but he doesn’t know yet what the full consequences of that difference are. And when I speak of “different”, I don’t just mean that our family is both foster/adoptive and transracial, as are many families here at FUUSA, I mean that our family is gay. Darius fully understands that he has two daddies, and that most families have a mommy and a daddy instead. But what he hasn’t realized yet is that many people hate our family because of that.

How will I explain that to him? Answering such difficult questions has not come easily to me as a parent. But with the help of my partner Steven I’ve come to see that the only way to deal with such questions is to speak the truth as honestly as I can. So when he asks me why people hate our family, I will have to tell him the truth. And what is the real truth? Not the comfortable, polite fictions we all tell ourselves, but the real truth of the matter. Well, I will tell him that there are two types of people who don’t like us:

The first type of people don’t like us because they don’t know us. We’re strange to them, like a strange food, like Green Eggs and Ham. And with people like that, we need to be patient, we need to be like Sam I Am. Remember, the guy kept saying “I do not like Green Eggs and Ham”, and Sam I Am kept saying, “try it, try it and you may I say.” With people like that we need to be patient, we need to show them that we’re not scary, that there’s no reason to be afraid of us. That although our family is different, we’re people too, just like they are.

But there are other people who don’t like us because they are just mean, evil, hateful people. Let’s speak the truth. Those people don’t like us and they don’t even want to know us, they won’t even give us a try. They just want to be mean. Oh, they say they have reasons, like “I don’t like you because of something I read in a book” or “I don’t like you because a man in a robe and a silly hat told me to be mean to you”. But those are just lies. And you can tell they’re lies because they’re just silly. Because if I didn’t want to be mean to someone, then I wouldn’t be mean to them, no matter what I read in a book or no matter what a man in a robe told me no matter what kind of silly hat he was wearing. People like that just want to be mean, and worse, they lie about why they’re being mean. Let’s speak the truth. Our culture is still in deep denial about the fact that GLBT people even exist. And we would rather lie to ourselves that face that contradiction. Let me tell you about just two examples of the type of behavior I’m talking about.
One of the greatest American poets – arguably perhaps our greatest American poet – was Walt Whitman. We teach his poetry in our schools as an indispensable part of our American cultural heritage, yet in many of those same schools throughout our country we still bar teachers from employment if they are members of the GLBT community. This is not an abstract issue for my family; Steven worked as a teacher here in the Capital District before passage of the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, and had to face the possibility of being fired from his position because of his orientation.

Yet Walt Whitman himself was a member of the GLBT community, and had a long-term relationship with a bus conductor named Peter Doyle. But facing that fact would mean also facing the fact that we discriminate against gay people in the very same schools where we praise a gay poet as quintessentially American. So we prefer to deny it, and further to deny how eloquently Walt writes about the love that is possible between men.

Now you may be an educated person, you may say to me, “Well, Brian, in fact I have read Leaves of Grass and, sure, Walt talks about ‘the dear love of comrades’, but I think you’re overstating the case a bit.”

Well, I’m sorry to have to tell you that if you think you’ve read Leaves of Grass, you haven’t read Leaves of Grass. If you’re older than about 18, any edition of Leaves of Grass that you’ve been exposed to has been expurgated and bowdlerized. Expurgated – parts have been taken out – and bowdlerized – parts have been rewritten – so it wouldn’t seem so gay. An unaltered version of leaves of grass wasn’t available anywhere in this country – in Walt Whitman’s own country – until the mid 1990s.

Now when your high school English teacher passed out copies of Leaves of Grass she didn’t say “this is Leaves of Grass, by one of America’s greatest poets, but don’t worry, we’ve taken all of the gay stuff out”. When you bought a copy of Leaves of Grass in the bookstore it didn’t say “Leaves of Grass, without all that yucky gay stuff”. It doesn’t even say Abridged.

You were lied to. You were lied to by people who didn’t even know they were lying to you. That’s how deep our denial goes.

And we’re still doing it. One of the greatest tragedies our country has ever faced was September 11th, and one of the greatest heroes of that day was a catholic priest named father Mychal Judge. Father Mychal was the Chaplain to the New York City Fire Department and after the planes crashed into the towers, he immediately rushed to the scene, where he began ministering to the injured and delivering last rites to the dying. It was while performing his duties as a priest that Father Mychal was killed by blunt force trauma to the head when the south tower collapsed and debris exploded into the north tower lobby where he was working.

And Father Mychal Judge was gay.

I should be clear that I am in no way implying that he broke his priestly vows; but Father Mychal was open about his sexual orientation. His death was a hammer blow to the New York City GLBT community, where he was active in ministering to those with HIV/AIDS and in working with the gay religious organization Dignity. A former alcoholic, he was also active in Gay AA, and literally hundreds of clean and sober gay people today attribute Father Mychal with having saved their lives.

The picture of Father Mychal’s fire department comrades carrying his lifeless body from the wreckage of the two towers is one of the most moving images of that tragic day. Nearly three thousand people attended his funeral, and he was nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His battered helmet was even presented to Pope John Paul II. Father Mychal Judge died a hero, both by the standards of civil society and by the standards of his own religion, but God forbid we should admit he was gay.

Now I didn’t come here today just to bash the Catholic church; after all, how well would that go over with a group of Unitarians? Father Mychal is one of the most egregious examples, but he is hardly the only one, historically or in the present day. Ask me sometime about Eleanor Roosevelt, ask me sometime about the Salvation Army, ask me sometime about the Red Cross, ask me sometime about the history of Amnesty International.

These religious and social institutions claim high principles; indeed some of the highest we can imagine. Yet when faced with the reality of GLBT people, they fail the acid test. Worse, they deny both that failure and even the simple existence of GLBT people, because they can’t face the contradiction within their own faith. And that contradiction within their faiths isn’t just a minor matter, isn’t just a difference of religious opinion. It’s more than that – their inability to deal with the truth of GLBT people is an essential defect within those belief systems. And rather than face the reality that their faiths are flawed at a fundamental level, the members of those religions would rather live in denial, no matter how outrageous.

Which brings us to FUUSA, and the three things I want to tell you about what it means for my family, as a GLBT family, to be part of this community.

First, I want to thank you for making a welcoming place here at FUUSA for me and my family. Not as people, not as individuals, but by welcoming us before you even knew who we were, as a matter of principle. I’ve only been a member of FUUSA for a short time but I am well aware of this congregation’s long support for the GLBT community and our rights, especially the right to marry. Indeed it was this attitude that in part helped bring our family here to become members of FUUSA. And I can tell you that there are many people in the GLBT parenting community who attend services at congregations in other faiths where they feel personally accepted, yet those same congregations will not stand up for their rights as GLBT people and as families, either within their faiths or without. Because those congregations are still in denial about the essential failure of their religions in this regard.

Which leads me to my second point, which is to tell you that FUUSA’s embrace of the fundamental rights of gay people is righteous. Righteous. And I tell you that your righteousness – our righteousness – will prevail. Day by day, year by year, generation by generation.

Even if it takes us a millenium.

And I say to you as a gay man, as a gay father and parent, and as a member of the GLBT community that you as Unitarians are entitled to feel pride in that righteousness. I think that’s a very hard thing for members of The Quiet Faith to hear. Especially because we as Unitarians respect all faiths. But I do not, because the hard truth is that all faiths do not respect me, do not respect my family. Remember, I am the acid test. When it comes to me and my family, almost all other religious and spiritual faiths fail, and lie about that failure. Unitarianism does not.

So my wish for you in the coming month of Gay Pride is that all of you – as Unitarians and as FUUSAns – should feel some Unitarian pride too. And when you see a rainbow flag, or see a gay pride march on TV, I hope that all of you will stand a little straighter, walk a little taller, because you have earned the right to feel that pride through your righteousness.

And finally, I want to reassure you. If despite what I’ve said, if you still find GLBT people uncomfortable, a little too different, maybe just hard to like, a little too much like Green Eggs and Ham … well, that’s okay too. Because we’re all Unitarians together. And in this faith, more than any other, it’s not about being the same. It’s not even about believing in the same things; it’s about the values we all share.

And if you choose to stand with us, if you choose to stand by those values, to honor the inherent worth and dignity of every person – every person, yes, even if they’re gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, or transgendered – despite any personal discomfort you might feel … then I honor that in you. Because that adherence to our core Unitarian values, even when it might make us uncomfortable, instead of living in denial, that is true righteousness.

But in closing I would also commend to you the words of a great teacher and spiritual master who once said, “Try us, try us and you may I say.”